Metro Sends Final U-Link Plan to Council

Late yesterday afternoon, Metro transmitted to the King County Council a proposed ordinance including a final U-Link restructure proposal, along with a few other changes also scheduled for March 2016. Executive Constantine issued a press release summarizing the proposed changes. UPDATE: Councilmember Larry Phillips has introduced the changes as two separate ordinances. 2015-0350 covers the changes related to U-Link, while 2015-0349 covers the RapidRide C/D split and other miscellaneous changes.

There are some important differences between the final proposal and Metro’s last proposal, which we covered in March. But the basic idea is the same. In Northeast Seattle, Metro is proposing a major restructuring that would double frequency on almost all of the area’s all-day routes, and add some new coverage, in exchange for requiring some off-peak riders to transfer to Link or another bus to go downtown. In Capitol Hill, Metro is proposing a less extensive set of changes mainly intended to improve frequency and reliability on busy routes and connect more areas to Capitol Hill Station. As with the March proposal, there are almost no changes to SR 520 service, although Metro’s Victor Obeso said yesterday that proposals for SR 520 are likely to be reintroduced later in an Eastside-specific process.

I and the STB staff I’ve talked to are extremely happy about the Northeast Seattle proposals in particular, because they would profoundly improve all-direction mobility in a part of the city where the bus network is decades old and built around infrequent rides to just two destinations. I see this ordinance as the best opportunity the Council has had in years to improve the usability of Seattle’s transit network, and urge the Council as strongly as I can to pass it.

Details of the proposals below the jump.

Northeast Seattle

Double Frequency on Existing Core Routes. Metro’s proposal would bring 15-minute service all day, six to seven days a week, to the following core corridors:

Super-Frequent Link Connections in the U-District. Metro faces a geographical challenge in replacing downtown express service on routes 71, 72, and 73 until U-District Station opens in 2021. The current express service has heavy demand from the U-District, while UW Station is a mile or so away, next to Husky Stadium. Metro is addressing this issue by providing extremely frequent bus service between UW Station and the U-District on five separate all-day routes: 44, 45, 48, 67, and 271. In addition to these all-day routes, several peak-hour routes also serve the trip. Metro is promising frequency of 3-4 minutes at most times of day, and no less than 8 minutes at any time when buses are running.

New Transfer and Wayfinding Options at UW Station. Metro, SDOT, and UW are cooperating to move most bus stops near UW Station closer to the station. Bus stops along Pacific Street will be moved as close to Montlake Boulevard as possible. New stops will be established on Montlake Boulevard near Pacific Place. For routes running through the UW campus, a new pair of bus stops will be added along Stevens Way at Rainier Vista, about a 5-minute walk from UW Station. Metro and Sound Transit are still working out details of the wayfinding plan, but Metro promised us that clear signage will help passengers transferring from Link locate bus routes serving any of these stops.

Create New, Frequent One-Seat Service Replacing Route 71. Metro would replace route 71 along NE 65th St with a new route, Route 62, running every 15 minutes, seven days a week (and more frequently during peak hours). The route would run between Sand Point and downtown via Ravenna, Green Lake, Wallingford, Fremont, and South Lake Union. It would preserve a one-seat ride to downtown for current route 71 riders in Ravenna and Roosevelt, and bring new frequent transfers to Wallingford, Fremont, and South Lake Union for riders throughout Northeast Seattle. For riders in Wallingford, it would replace route 16, adding a new connection to Fremont at the cost of a few minutes’ extra travel time.

Provide New Connections for Wedgwood and Laurelhurst. In response to criticism that Metro’s previous plans did not adequately replace the Wedgwood “tail” of route 71 or the Laurelhurst portion of Route 25, Metro added a new weekday, half-hourly route connecting Wedgwood, Laurelhurst, UW Station, and the U-District. This route would provide connections to both Link and the U-District with similar frequency to today’s route 71 and double the frequency of today’s route 25. It would be through-routed with revised route 73, which provides weekday coverage service to lower Roosevelt Way, eastern Maple Leaf, and Pinehurst.

More Frequent Peak-Hour Express Buses. Metro is adding service to several peak-hour routes that travel from Northeast Seattle directly to downtown, South Lake Union, and First Hill. It’s also creating a frequent transfer point between peak-hour express routes at Green Lake P&R, to allow new connections. Route 76 would nearly double the number of trips, partly by expanding the span of service to include a few “shoulder peak” trips, and route 316 would add a few trips as well. A new route 63 and a revised route 64 together would offer connections from Northgate, Maple Leaf, Lake City, Wedgwood, and Green Lake to South Lake Union and First Hill, with frequent transfers at either Green Lake or Stewart Street to downtown service. Route 74 serving Sand Point and Bryant would see several additional trips.

Capitol Hill

A portion of Metro’s Capitol Hill map.

After extensive debate and sharply mixed community feedback on its initial proposals, Metro ended up making relatively minor changes in Capitol Hill.

Split Routes 8 and 48, and Increase Frequency. These two long routes are among Metro’s least reliable; during afternoon rush hour, route 8 is the least reliable. Both are also key connecting service to Link, each at multiple stations. Metro is devoting substantial resources in this proposal to splitting each one in half to improve reliability and Link transfers.

Route 8 would be split at Mount Baker Station. The north half, retaining the 8 number, would see a minor routing change in Madison Valley and an increase in daytime frequency to 12 minutes, although with no increase in currently inadequate night and Sunday frequencies. The south half would be unchanged except to adopt a new number, route 38, and lose the major delays it experiences southbound.

Route 48 would be split at the U-District. The south half would retain the 48 number and see an increase in frequency to 10 minutes daytime, 15 minutes night. It would terminate at NE 45th in the U-District. The north half would be renumbered as route 45, and would terminate at UW Station.

These changes should dramatically increase reliability on the new 38 and on both halves of the previous 48. They will not, unfortunately, directly do anything to solve the Denny Way mess that makes a hash out of the 8’s schedule.

Connect Route 11 to Link, and Increase Frequency. Route 11 would be revised to serve Capitol Hill Station by using John Street, rather than Pine Street, through Capitol Hill. It would remain on Madison east of 19th, while Madison west of 19th will be served by unchanged route 12. Frequency would increase to 15 minutes all day, six days a week, and 30 minutes nights and Sundays. Metro did not implement its March proposal of an “all-Madison” route 11, choosing instead to insert a small deviation to serve Madison between Thomas and 19th. Metro’s Ted Day estimated that the deviation will add 2-3 minutes per trip.

Replace Route 43 with Increased Frequency Elsewhere. The funding for frequency increases on routes 11, 48, and 49 would come from discontinuing route 43. Most route 43 riders would have straightforward replacement service on Link, or on more-frequent routes 8, 11, or 48. Some riders, though, will need to transfer between route 48 and routes 8 or 11 at 23rd and Madison. The increased frequency, with buses every 10 minutes on route 48 and 9 buses per hour on routes 8/11, should make these transfers a good deal less painful.

Other Routes Unchanged Except for Frequency. Routes 2, 9X, 10, 12, 47, and 49 are all unchanged, except for a major frequency increase on the 49 and minor frequency increases on the 10 and 12.

Other Changes

The ordinance includes a few changes in other areas, some related to the Link restructure effort, others not.

Revision of Routes 26 and 28. Because new route 62 would take over for routes 26 and 28 along Dexter Ave in South Lake Union, both of these routes would become all-day expresses using Aurora, still at 30-minute frequency. The revised 26X would use today’s 26X routing between Green Lake and downtown, bypassing Fremont and serving eastern Wallingford. North of Green Lake, the all-day 26X would be extended to replace the northern portion of route 16, serving Licton Springs and North Seattle Community College. The revised 28X would use a new routing through Fremont, using N 39 St (a walk of one long block from central Fremont) to reach Aurora, rather than N 46 St as with today’s 28X.

Routes 31 and 32 would also see a minor routing change to replace coverage to the Gas Works area now provided by route 26 local, approaching Fremont via Wallingford Ave and 35th instead of via 40th and Stone.

RapidRide C/D Split. The RapidRide C and D lines would no longer be through-routed. The C Line would be extended to South Lake Union via Westlake with a terminus near Fred Hutch at Fairview/Aloha, while the D Line would be extended to Pioneer Square along 3rd Ave. Funded by Seattle Proposition 1, the split is expected to dramatically improve outbound reliability on both routes, and to help alleviate frequent overcrowding on current SLU bus service.

Grab Bag. As always, there are a few minor items to cover:

At Metro and the Sounding Board’s urging, Sound Transit may add a stop on route 522 at 85th/Lake City Way, to restore some lost connectivity that results from deleting route 72.

Add frequency to I-5 peak express routes 179 and 190, thanks to a state grant.

Change route 200 to eliminate the loop through south downtown Issaquah.

Extend route 238 from Bothell to Woodinville, to replace coverage lost from truncating now more frequent route 372 to end in Bothell.

Delete route 242, which has become increasingly redundant with faster Sound Transit routes 542, 545, and 555, losing ridership as a result.

Implement new alternative service in the Auburn-Enumclaw-Black Diamond corridor. So far, the improvements are unspecified except for frequency improvements to DART route 915.

The UW has the more individual bike lockers than anywhere in the country with more than 600 on campus, and they also have racks, covered racks and secure houses. And I’m pretty sure the new UW station will have its own bike parking, but I can’t remember what kind.

Also, obviously Pronto will move some stations around/add stations once U-Link is operational. They’ve said this all along, yet people still get up in arms about it. There’s no point in having a station at the stadium right now, only once U-Link is operational. Other stations on the trail might be a good idea, but there needs to be enough space so that users don’t stop and block through traffic on the trail.

You could build the pronto station now (now that the bridge is done) and it would be used. There is a clinic inside the stadium, and a major hospital across the street (there is a pronto station on the other side of the hospital, but that is far enough away as to be inconvenient if approaching from the other side). As far as Pronto Stations go, they seem oblivious to the existence of the Burke Gilman — which seems crazy given the fact that the bikes are really well suited for it (for safety and performance reasons). So, yes, compared to the fact that there are no stations in Fremont or Ballard, the fact that they don’t have Pronto stations right now next to the stadium is a minor problem.

As far as bike lockers go, just about all the bike parking is for student and faculty only, if I’m not mistaken. I don’t know what the plans are for the station, but all I’m saying is that it should be very big — much bigger than anything that exists now (and it should be available to everyone with an ORCA card). That might be in the works anyway (like you, I forget).

There are some pretty cool on-demand e-Lockers for a demonstration period (ending 2016?) at Northgate Transit Center. They’re not connected to ORCA, but they have a similar card. Unfortunately it’s a lousy place to demonstrate them because it’s such a pain to bike to Northgate and I’ve never seen another bike in any one of them. I hope they get a second chance somewhere like the UW station. They’re inexpensive, there’s no contract that you’ll use them all the time. It’s fairly similar to the Pronto process, but with a locker (and no on-site fob dispenser) I kind of wish Pronto would acquire them or partner with them and have one fob for both (I use my bike to Northgate and Pronto on the other end).

Eh, I am short and all my strength is below the waist: I have a bike but never ride it because I don’t like getting it out the door, and I would not take it with me on the train.

But while the 31/32 are still unreliable and infrequent, the 62 does not go near Montlake, and a wonderful bike path shadows the same origin-destination pair (Fremont – Montlake, e.g.), it’s a crying shame that there isn’t a station in Fremont and maybe another in Gasworks. Pronto at the light rail station would be nice, but its absence is not really what grinds my gears, if you will.

However, I can see how bike cages at the station would be important to everyone who lives north: a nice flat cycle -> rail is probably a nice way to get downtown from Bothell, e.g.

I really don’t see how the Capitol Hill restructure improves connections to Capitol Hill Station for anyone east of Broadway. 15th Ave still has no service to the station. 19th Ave (north of Thomas) still has no service to the station. 23rd Ave LOSES service to the station with the deletion of the 43, and in exchange gains a transfer penalty to the 8/11 PLUS an additional 2-3 minutes delay due to the detour. The John/Thomas frequent corridor LOSES ALL SERVICE between 19th and 23rd, for some reason having it diverted Madison.

This proposal continues to send almost every route on the Hill to downtown, with most of the service not even going to Capitol Hill Station first.

Recently improved, busy stops on John and Thomas will no longer be served at all while a new stop will need to be built. The signals and curbs at 19th and Madison will have to be rebuilt.

On 19th between Madison and Thomas buses going in opposite directions will both be going downtown.

Service from the east to Meany Middle School is cut, apparently to have the 8/11 serve two different Safeways.

Weekend service, especially on Sundays, is still significantly less frequent than today along John/Thomas.

How is this proposal an improvement? What happened to the vision we saw back in the days of the original alternatives?

As David emphasized, there is much happiness about the northeast Seattle restructure. I hope it doesn’t get held up because of all the disagreements among stakeholders in the Capitol Hill vicinity. The northeast restructure needs to move forward and pass. Lots and lots of northeast Seattleites have been waiting years for improved access to downtown and the rest of Seattle via UW Station. They have waited long enough.

Some in Capitol Hill have even tried to hold the northeast restructure hostage to getting their way with the Capitol Hill restructure, and appear to have won. At this point, I don’t care. If I need to get anywhere around Capitol Hill, I will walk from the station. But getting around northeast Seattle … Do I really have to wait until March?

The longer the northeast restructure gets held up, the worse the Capitol Hill restructure becomes. At least that is what I am seeing. I wish Metro had listened better to the advice of the Sounding Board. The Sounding Board did great work. I hope they stick around, keep in contact with each other, and brings back the plan that actually improves access to Capitol Hill Station, some time in the near future.

But right now, it’s time for the baby to be born, warts and all. You can’t please 100% of the people 100% of the time with any route restructure proposal, but this one has unprecedented levels of support north of the canal.

Route 62 will be a great connector between neighborhoods but not so much a ‘one-seat ride’ for anyone east of Roosevelt unless they love riding the bus. It would make more sense to keep it on 65th all the way instead of having it doing the cumbersome Ravenna/Woodlawn jog.

I’m not sure how much happiness there is about the North Seattle restructure. If you look at a map of the changes, you will notice a lot of very peculiar routes. For example, the 67 connects Northgate with the UW (which is great). But it does so in a very slow manner. First it heads north (into terrible traffic) then takes several turns before heading south. That will make that bus ride much slower — and for what? To pick up a handful of people on Maple Leaf?

Overall, though, I think it is better, because buses will be much more frequent. But let’s not get too excited. This is not an ideal set of routes. It still (in classic Metro fashion) sacrifices speed for coverage. This is a reasonable trade-off, but one that ultimately leads to less ridership. Metro — we’ll get you there — if you are really patient.

The big change for the north end will happen when Link goes farther north. As it is, I commend Metro for making an aggressive restructure, given the limited changes to the system. If U-Link went to the UW, then a lot of the new routes would be a lot easier. So while I don’t think this plan is outstanding for anyone, it is still a very solid step in the right direction, and a sign of better changes to come.

But of course, Capitol Hill/C.D./Central Area (whatever you want to call it) is screwed. They were screwed when Sound Transit decided to add only one station between the UW and downtown. This station was never designed to work well with the buses either. The best hope for the area is more BRT (like on Madison). Speaking of which, that might help the 67 situation as well. If Seattle builds South Lake Union/Eastlake/Roosevelt/Northgate BRT, then the 67 becomes a lot less important, and its shortcomings don’t matter much. If that is the case — if Metro put this route in after talking to SDOT — then I take back every criticism I made about that route, and the north end routes in general.

By all means, keep the NE Seattle restructure. Even keep the splits on the 48 and the 8 (I think it’s a great idea). The Capitol Hill restructure, though, is a compromise that makes no one happy and leaves riders with WORSE service than they have today. Take it out of the ordinance if that’s what’s needed, but I can’t support this plan as is.

The 67’s going north and then south again is only a problem if your actual destination at Northgate is the transit center. If the actual destination is the mall or Target, you can just use the stop at 5th and Northgate.

While there are some trips that do requiring going through Northgate Transit Center to make a connection, they’re not very popular, and pretty awful today (pre-restructure) anyway.

The 67’s going north and then south again is only a problem if your actual destination at Northgate is the transit center. If the actual destination is the mall or Target, you can just use the stop at 5th and Northgate.

This is what critics of the 67 routing seem to be strangely ignoring. Also if you look at a density map, there’s a lot more of it closer to Northgate Way than the transit center.

The proposed 67 may be an inefficient way to serve the TC, but it’s a better way to serve the actual people and businesses in the neighborhood than a more direct route to the TC. That ought to matter more, I’d think.

>> The 67’s going north and then south again is only a problem if your actual destination at Northgate is the transit center

or any of the apartments, or clinics, or restaurants or any of the other places along 5th or close to the transit center. Or if you are headed to the campus (assuming the bridge is built). But the transit center (where numerous other buses connect) is enough of a destination to justify the faster, more efficient service. Although, to be fair, from 5th and Northgate, you will be able to catch the connecting bus on Northgate Way (the 16). Oh, wait, that bus is going away.

Then there are the service hours wasted with this silly button hook. Again, there are trade-offs. If you make a grid, you save service hours, which then add up to more frequency. This deviates from the grid for no good reason. You end up with less transfers (for a handful of people) while leaving some people without service, and a lot of people with a really crappy bus ride. Its not like the handful of people who would benefit from the one seat ride have a terrible transfer either. There are a half dozen buses that run up 5th, and three bus routes up to Northgate Way and Roosevelt.

Its simply not a good trade-off. Anytime you make a button hook like that you should ask yourself if it is worth it. In this case, the answer is no. Not even close.

Is my reading correct that with the loss of the Route 43, every inch of trolleywire between UW Station and Group Health Hospital will join the George Benson Line catenary in an outdoor aerial warehouse?

With an inventory that cost taxpayers Lord knows how many million dollars, its value now fluctuating with the price of scrap copper?

The trolleywire gathering artistic patina from Madison to Second to a half block up James should be wasted wire enough. At least the 9th Avenue wire from Virginia Mason Hospital to Harborview serves as a back-up.

A city this Green should blush Koch-smelter red for its habit of trashing electric transit. Believe me, nothing against bicycles for a subject of discussion.

But I’m sure Atlantic Base still has operating personnel who feel the same way about their machines as bicyclists feel about theirs. Word to the pols should be: every foot of copper wire needs a daily polish with a carbon shoe.

It’s amazing how each proposal Metro comes up with is worse than the previous one. Given that the June plan remove all E Madison service between 24th Ave East and 19th they now take the 8 and 11 off of John/Thomas and run both on East Madison. What happened to removing DUPLICATION>’

The big question is, how are 60 foot buses going to make the sharp turn at 19th Ave East and East Madison? We will now have the 8, 11 and 12 making the sharp turn. In addition, what happened to comments about extra turns being a problem?

There is one quick fix for this proposal and that is to have the 11 continue on East Madison to 12th East or 15th East and then turn North to Light Rail. This will fills some of the gap.

It’s was great to see that the Metro admits that the proposed 11 routing will be longer and I would be willing to bet that the 8 will too! Given that the 8 and 11 are not reliable runs, how this is a step backwards!

Yes, I think the 8 should stay on John/Thomas as it is today, but in addition, i would have the 11 continue to 12th or 15 Ave East to turn north. These remove the duplication, but neither solve the reliability of the 11 especially since the run would be longer!!!

I think the best solution would be keep the 11 as is, but the gap caused by removing the 43 needs to be filled someway.

I’ve got to agree — this will benefit those in the immediate vicinity of the CH station, but it seems to be at the expense of those east of 15th avenue, out of the primary walkshed.

The 19th Ave deviations for the 8/11 seem rather pointless, action for action’s sake. It isn’t like that stretch of Thomas/John and Madison suffer mightily from traffic or congestion issues. (Brownie points for splitting the 8 and 48, though. Demerits for re-instating the Yesler/23rd/Jackson deviation.)

The biggest losers are definitely on 23rd Avenue. No direct connection to CHS at all, and are punished with having to either journey to UW Station on the 48 (which is the wrong direction and liable to sit in Montlake Bridge traffic) or transfer at Madison to a less-direct set of buses. I’m thinking wait-and-see: it’s a philosophical argument, of routing versus frequency. Will all those extra 48s be able to match up with all the extra 11s?

>> The biggest losers are definitely on 23rd Avenue. No direct connection to CHS at all, and are punished with having to either journey to UW Station on the 48 (which is the wrong direction and liable to sit in Montlake Bridge traffic) or transfer at Madison to a less-direct set of buses.

I don’t want to defend all the changes, but I don’t think this is that bad. If someone on 23rd is heading downtown, then the CHS is not that great of a station. If I’m at 23rd and Yesler, or 23rd and Cherry, I don’t want to slog to CHS, walk through the station, only to take the train a couple stops. Chances are, the bus heading right downtown is faster. Even if I am north of Madison, I think I would prefer the Madison BRT. The transfer is much faster (being on the surface) and by the time a regular bus has worked its way around Group Health, the BRT should be very close to downtown. I guess a lot depends on which part of downtown you are going to. I suppose it is bad if you are headed to the Rainier Valley, but a lot of folks will just stay on the 8 in that case (and avoid the transfer penalty).

Where it gets bad is heading north. Like you said, Montlake traffic is bad. So bad that if you wanted to go to Northgate, you might prefer a bus that “went the wrong direction” (to CHS) instead of slogging to the UW station. But the problem is caused by the lack of stations, not Metro’s reroute. A transfer at CHS will never be great for that connection — there should be a stop on 23rd (any stop on 23rd would be better than what is about to be built).

Call me back when Madison BRT has funding and is operating. In the meantime east Capitol Hill is left in the cold, waiting for buses that either don’t go to the station or meander off track for reasons unknown.

For what it’s worth I agree that Sound Transit isn’t without blame in this. Having a single station to “serve” all of Capitol Hill was a terrible decision, but it’s also a decision that we can’t do anything about anymore. The onus is on Metro to provide service to that station, and with this proposal they’ve failed terribly.

When we had the original two alternatives (massive restructure with a frequent grid of service versus essentially no change) Metro said we’d probably end up with a compromise between the two. I never imagined they’d pick the worst aspects of both.

Yes, riders on 23rd south of Madison are already in good shape. It’s definitely unlikely they’ll go to CHS when the 2, 3, or 4 would be more direct.

North of there, and all the way to Montlake is murkier…though, really, I don’t see too many riders on that stretch these days. I ride the 43 and 48 to/from UW, and while there are plenty of people on the bus, not a lot of people actually embark at those stops. (And then yes, we sit in Montlake traffic. Can’t wait for those new 43s with AC.)

(Sidebar: I know that the eastbound 11 is bad now on Pike/Pine, and I have a hard time seeing how Bellevue/Olive/John is any better during the peak, but isn’t that why the train is even being built? If I’m going east from CHS, I don’t care how long it takes the bus to actually get there, only that it does, and with something resembling predictable frequency.)

I think avoiding 23rd and John as a transfer point is a good thing for safety. The WB John stop is already at 22nd so transferring riders already have to walk a block. Sight distances on John at 23rd are horrible because of the grade change so it’s risky for pedestrians. It seems steeper on John between Madison and 23rd.

The new routing gives better Trader Joe’s access for CD, North Cap Hill and South Lake Union residents.

Surely Metro tested the 19th and Madison turns in the field. Would they really be so incompetent to not have done that? If so, there should be changes made to their service planning management.

The John/Thomas frequent corridor LOSES ALL SERVICE between 19th and 23rd, for some reason having it diverted Madison.

While it’s true that buses will no longer physically traverse John/Thomas between 19th and 23rd, that isn’t quite the same as “losing all service”, since there aren’t actually any stops that will be losing service. There will still be a stop at 19th/Thomas, and there will still be a stop at 23rd/Madison, which is a very short block away from 23rd/John. There are no stops in between.

The reason it’s being diverted to Madison is to add a stop at 19th/Madison. This is understandable; it’s a well-used stop in a dense and growing area, and those riders have expressed a strong preference for a bus route that will take them directly to CHS. It’s not my first choice in the abstract — I preferred the 8/11 combination — but I think it’s a lot better than any of the other plans Metro has presented, as well as today’s service. I used to live at 17th and Madison, and I would have used this service constantly.

Good point, Reg. That’s the stop labeled as “23rd and John” on OBA, but it’s actually displaced from 23rd by one block. Moving the 8/11 to Madison will make transfers more easy, since the 23rd and Madison stop is actually at 23rd.

And the 22nd and Madison stop is only about 600 feet away from the so-called “23rd and John” stop that’s losing service.

No, I haven’t heard that! I expect it’ll be open by next February when this change takes effect; if not, that’s definitely a problem. (As is having the northbound 48 stop at the north side of John; that should be moved south too.)

Aleks, I have to admit a lot of my fury about the 43 wire is that I always loved driving my “4000” 60′ trolleybus uphill through a curve of wire on East John Street a half block before the left turn onto 23rd.

The design of the wire is as functional as it is artistically beautiful: the running wire is held from each side by a spiderweb of both wire and flexible fittings, permitting a coach to keep at operating speed.

Normally, even shallow curves in the wire require separate curving fittings to carry the power, at standard store-bought angles.

If the driver doesn’t slow the coach far below the speed limit, a series of these fittings in close succession will always throw the poles off the wire.

But for gentle, shallow, climbing curves like the one I’m describing, the grooved power collectors in on the ends of the poles follow smoothly at street speed.

Reason for the artistic hardware lecture is that since any coach delay caused by either “slow order” requirement or dewirement wastes operating money.

And any major service change is an excellent excuse, I mean opportunity, to move what’s in the way.

As for wasted wire, I know there are plans to electrify the south half of the 48, so a fortune of wire is already there. They haven’t yet taken down all the overhead wire for the Benson line yet.

I understand that there are stops nearby, which (barring construction) lessen the impact of this change. I still don’t understand, though, why this deviation is being considered in the first place. In order to be understandable, reliable, and fast bus routes need to continue in straight lines when possible. There is already frequent service in a straight line corridor running from 23rd to the future Capitol Hill Station and continuing to Olive and Denny. This proposal breaks that legibility, introduces greater unreliability (tight turns, additional stoplights), and abandons stops that recently had a lot of new concrete poured. Riders will have to walk to stops that are further away, are located on narrower sidewalks with no buffer from fast moving traffic, and in exchange get a longer, less reliable bus ride.

If the 8 and 11 already ran on John/Thomas today and Metro proposed diverting them to Madison between 24th and 19th, how would that be justified? Not mitigated. Justified.

Thank you for stating a simple fact, the transfers that Metro is requiring current 8 and 11 user to make (for no reason) are NOT seamless. It appears to me that the reason all the other plans failed is that they called for transfers that were not seamless not could they be explained away by Metro Planners either!

I predict this plan will be rejected for the same reason! I think the plan could be made to work if and only if the 8 is moved back to John/Thomas and for the 11 to continue up Pine to 19th where it would turn north to John and LR! The only other option is to postpone the CH changes until the LR in implemented in March 2016 so its impact along with Prop One changed can be evaluated!

What I’m suggesting is the 8 move back to John and the 11 continue west on East Madison to East Pine as it does today and turn north on 12th or 15th Ave east to East John and LR. I think this will take away the majority of negates the rides of the 8, 11 and 43.

One other advantage is that it allow riders to make a seamless transfer at 12th or 15th and East Pine to the 10 as a quicker way to get downtown!

“Metro did not implement its March proposal of an “all-Madison” route 11, choosing instead to insert a small deviation to serve Madison between Thomas and 19th. Metro’s Ted Day estimated that the deviation will add 2-3 minutes per trip.”

I’d be very interested to see the calculations from Metro’s service guidelines that support this deviation. Not the equations, I’ve seen those. I want the actual numbers and analysis that show that this deviation justified, particularly since it violates some of the other guidelines (e.g easy to understand, appropriate service).

My best guess is that this is a raw political calculation, not related to the service guidelines at all. Many different groups have threatened to sink the entire restructure over various proposed changes in Capitol Hill, and this, as ugly as it is, may be seen as the solution that keeps anyone from outright trying to kill it.

If we’re going to throw the service guidelines out the window every time they make people upset then why bother having them at all. I’m very disappointed in the way Metro has handled the Capitol Hill portion of the restructure, and am particularly upset with Kevin Desmond and Dow Constantine for approving it. This flies in the face of their stated goals to improve efficiency and integrate service with Sound Transit.

I think they are calculating that this is what has to be done to get 1) NE Seattle and 2) the split 48 with 10-minute frequency on the south half. Adopting something that is 90% based on the Service Guidelines is vastly better than nothing at all.

Both? Alt 1 was great. It created a network that both connected to the station AND let people travel to places other than downtown. I can accept something less than great, but this proposal is worse than what we have now.

I don’t see why Capitol Hill changes (or lack thereof) have to be tied to NE Seattle changes. Other than the 48 split there’s no interaction between the two areas.

Running the 48 more often (which I strongly support) also does nothing to help with Capitol Hill access to Link, especially since no new routes connect with it and the two that do now have a pointless diversion. Some of Metro’s Capitol Hill maps during the outreach process didn’t even go as far east as 23rd. I think that’s telling about the way they view Capitol Hill service.

I continue to be baffled by the lack of service to Capitol Hill Station from areas that are within one mile but outside the half-mile walkshed, while routes in those areas continue to travel to downtown.

The 48 split requires the 43’s service hours. That’s how north Seattle affects Capitol Hill. If you keep the 43 you can’t split the 48. If you split the 48 you have to delete the 43, and that causes cascading effects that requires mitigation by other routes. The 48 split is Very Important for reliability, has long been requested, allows electrifying the 48S later, and provides essential double-frequency in the U-District both before Brooklyn Station opens and after it.

Mike, is it true that the 43’s service hours are almost completely going to spilt the 48? I don’t think most of the public is aware of this use of service hours. It seems a bit wasteful, even if the route does need to be spilt.

One thing that could redeem this is to link one or both parts of the 48 with other routes. Namely could the 67 be bumped to the 48s frequency if they were one route instead of separate corridors.

522 is already crushload at peak. ST would be acting out it’s teen fantasies, promising much, delivering little, as those suckers sit on 85th watching those sweet 522 rear-ends drive on by. Such a little tease.

The northern portion of the 522 is going to lose local ridership to the increased frequency of the 372. It’s a good way for it to keep its numbers up, and it’ll be a useful addition to the all day mobility of the shared network, even if it turns out to be less useful at peak.

(And it’s rarely as “crush loaded” as people act like it is. The refusal to make room for more people on Seattle buses is maddening and selfish.)

The added stop on 85th isn’t really intended to provide service from 85th downtown; it’s intended to provide connections from points north to bus service along 15th.

And, agreed on the selfish tendencies of riders. I rode the 306/312/522 daily for about a year and a half. Many of the passengers I saw passed up could have been accommodated if people were willing to get a bit closer.

When the peak-only expresses aren’t running, the stop on 85th will be extremely useful for getting downtown. It will at 2-3 times as fast as any off-peak options to that neighborhood today. Even if you have to walk a full mile to get to that stop, you would probably still come out ahead over other options.

I totally agree that a stop at 85th would be very useful at non-peak times, especially on Saturday night or Sunday when the 67 will be running only every 30 minutes. I live about a 10 minute walk from 85th and would much rather take a 522 and walk compared to Link to Husky Stadium and wait maybe 30 minutes for the 67.

Yes, that is a very nice addition (and long overdue in my opinion). I’ve found bus service in the area to be very frustrating if you don’t have a smart phone or know the routes (a lot of buses run by there but don’t stop). This will make for good service to the area, and some nice transfers (north on the frequent 67, then northeast on the frequent 522). We are slowly turning our bus routes into a grid — and a grid needs bus stops where the buses cross.

Enjoy it while you can. The 522 is heading toward being truncated at 145th Station in the future. That’s not set in stone but it’s the direction the ST project list is leading toward, and what the letters from King County cities asked for.

I’m more concerned that the 85th stop is pretty close to the freeway entrance and the lineup/clot of the SOV cars in the right lane.

OTOH, I have been campaigning where I can for Lake City BRT to Roosevelt, and I think that lower 80s/LCW is going to be pain point in that corridor. If ST can make that 522 stop work, I consider it a dress rehearsal.

While this stop will definitely help the Ravenna/Maple Leaf area, it’s a significant haul to transfer to and from 15th Ave NE corridor services. What is still needed, as the sounding board recommended, is for the 522 to stop at 15th/80th (very prohibitive due to small sidewalks and heavy traffic however) or to truly provide more frequent Maple Leaf service. Options there could be 15 minute evening and Sunday service on the 67. Just as Upper Roosevelt and Maple Leaf are getting 20 hour a day/15 minute/7 day a week combined service on 72/73, it’s all being taken away.

During the evening hours, the 72 and 73 each run just hourly. Even when the 72 and 73 are each half-hourly, they are spaced alternating 10 and 20 minutes apart to achieve combined 10-minute service once they join up with the 71. The 72/73 combo never really has 15-minute combined service.

Prop 1 is boosting both the 72/73 to 30 minute headways all day, every day and eliminating local service on all but a handful of trips. It’s hard to say Link Connections changes are an improvement over Prop 1-supported routes.

As an eastsider I was particularly hoping that there would be some sort of integration with the eastside- remember the great proposal to through-route the 271 and the 45? I highly doubt anyone had anything negative to say about that.

It seems awkward that they are killing the 242 without any improvements. For example, they could “mitigate” it by rolling those service hours into a more frequent 542. That would turn a 1-seat ride into a 2, but that’s better than summary execution…

There will be new route 541 which, when combined with the 542, will provide double the frequency, at least as far north as campus parkway, during the span of service that the current 242 actually operates. If you begin your trip by taking the 67 to the U-district, you will be able to take advantage of the combined frequency of these two routes.

So, yeah, still really cheesed off that the 48 is being split in the U District so tantalizingly close to Roosevelt and a less winding-around-the-bog transfer to Lake City. I get that the wires don’t go that far but we’re still 5+ years away from Roosevelt station opening so to lose just those handful of blocks is aggravating.

At this point, pass it or don’t, I’m pretty close to giving up. Unless you’re a commute or daytime hours rider, Metro could really seem to not give a toss. We still have to transfer primarily in dark corners or the personal safety hazard that is downtown after the office workers go home, crosstown routes are half-hourly far too often, and you’d better want to be home at or around midnight.

Genuinely sorry for the negativity; I was hoping for a lot better but I’m not Metro’s target market. At least I can still get to Pike/Pine.

I’m sure the location of the 48 split will inconvenience some riders–and service revision will. But is there a plausible case for (a) a better location or (b) not splitting it, given that the service hours for the split are available? I’m having a hard time imagining either.

My idea would be to use the service hours elsewhere, or through-route the 48(S) with something like the 67. We’ve got so many underserved areas that it’s hard to excuse doubling up in the U-District, except maybe as a temporary measure till North Link comes in.

Pair the 48 with the 67, even half the time (as in every other 48 trip or just twice an hour), and I will stop being a grouch. Extend core routes like it to 1am and I will campaign for the ordinance with signs and t-shirts.

lakecityrider, the 48/67 through-route was in Alt 1. Metro had to reduce frequency on the 67 to satisfy riders in Pinehurst who were vocally upset about replacing the off-peak 73 with a two-seat ride. There’s no realistic way to through-route a 10-minute route and a 15-minute one.

While the STB authors seem to be cheerleaders for the ongoing splitting of what they consider to be “long routes” this approach is, in the long run, unsustainable.

We are seeing huge amounts of resources dedicated to providing two buses on overlapping sections where once one bus ran through.

I understand that long distances from terminal to terminal increase the probability of a delay.

I understand that bunching is beyond sub-optimal, and that late buses leads to apathy for our transit system among choice users.

But continuing to break up every route with reliability issues, in the name of making it shorter so it will be more reliable just won’t work forever.

There has to be a concerted effort to get these routes moving, through chokepoints and other known delay prone areas (which acknowledging that basically the Denny Way 8 is screwed – something that cannot be said for other routes on the “split” list). Many years ago Metro use to put together focus teams, cross functional in nature from inside the organization, to work through these issues and come up with suggestions to fix these problems.

These days, the only solutions we see are “split the route.”

I have mixed feelings about splitting the 48 at this time. The U Dist was always the natural split point for that route. But don’t forget, not so many years ago, the 48 ran all the way down MLK to Rainier Beach. That section was tacked on the 8 when LINK opened. This was done for “reliability.”

Did the 48’s reliability improve when the southernmost section was removed? Did it stay the same? Did it get worse? Does anyone follow up?

The flip side is that this split of the 48 allows for easy electrification of the section between the U District and Mt. Baker Station. And I’m all for that.

First of all, Metro has more resources now than it used to. Making hopelessly unreliable routes more reliable is a perfectly reasonable thing to do with those resources.

Secondly, you seem to be suggesting there’s something within Metro’s power to boost reliability in some other, less resource-intensive way. But can you share with us what that is? Getting more bus lanes, more signal priority, and other infrastructure improvements isn’t up to Metro, it’s up to SDOT. Getting more cars off the road to reduce traffic and congestion isn’t something Metro has the power to do either. What do you have in mind? What option, currently on Metro’s plate, is going unused?

It’s also worth pointing out that the 48 split enables the 48S to have the higher frequency it deserves and increases frequency between the U-district and UW station a connection that needs to have extremely high frequency.

I also think this is a case a breaking eggs to make an omlet. Eventually I suspect Metro wants to at least through route the 45 (such as with route 271 as was originally proposed), and extend route 38 to Renton and they may even want to connect route 7 and route 48S. Metro doesn’t have the political capital to make those changes, but that doesn’t mean the split doesn’t make sense in the here and in an effort to move towards those goals.

“We are seeing huge amounts of resources dedicated to providing two buses on overlapping sections where once one bus ran through.”

… because that’s the highest-ridership section and needs more buses, especially with the coming 5-year gap between UW Station opening and U-District Station opening, when a lot of people will be taking a shuttle bus between them. There are a hundred people on the 71/72/73X every six minutes during peak who will be newly coming to 15th/Pacific and looking for a bus. OK, not all of them will, but at least half of them will. And Link’s reliability will probably attract more riders, who will also be looking for a bus on 15th/Pacific but aren’t there now.

“not so many years ago, the 48 ran all the way down MLK to Rainier Beach. That section was tacked on the 8 when LINK opened. This was done for “reliability.””

Was it? I thought it was to promote the new feeder/crosstown route, and to incentivize people to take Link if they’re going downtown and the 8 if they’re going crosstown. (The 8 absorbed the 42, which previously went on MLK to downtown. And did for an extra year because of ACLS/one-seat rider activism.) I’ve always thought Rainier Beach should have stayed with the 48, and should go back to it.

Actually, the 48 is not the only route spanning the gap between UW Station and 65th. The 67, 73, and 373 will also go up there, crossing 65th within five blocks of each other. So easy to take any of them northbound. More difficult southbound where you have to choose which street to wait on.

STB certainly hasn’t been ideologically blindered about splitting routes, as a principle. I wrote rather critically about a bill that would have paid for buses on the C/D line while requiring that the lines be split in perpetuity (i.e. an unfunded mandate, proposed by a freshman representative, for pork-barrel reasons).

In the case of the proposed 45/48, the routes being split were not an ideal pairing anyway, given one heads south and one heads west. And, as you point out, considerations of electrification are involved. Can we place at least some trust in the Sounding Board, Metro staff, Metro management, and the Executive that they know what they are doing?

@Brent: “Can we place at least some trust in the Sounding Board, Metro staff, Metro management, and the Executive that they know what they are doing?”

I very much did place my trust in them and I was rewarded for Alternative 1 so I sent my kudos and moved on with life. That trust was shattered with Alternative 3. Almost everything that would have been nice or useful for the Central Area in Alt1 was deleted in Alt3. I wrote feedback to Metro many times and tried to craft replies to the questions those folks sent back, so I give them a lot of credit for at least taking the time to write back.

Case in point: The new 45 is supposed to run with “the same frequency” as the current 48. However, the 45 will run for an additional service hour in the evening, a benefit which the remaining 48 does not get.

Alt1 would have left open access to a slice of the north end on a direct route–service that we have today to the Roosevelt and U-District urban villages–and enhanced it by connecting to Northgate. That is gone. The 11 takes a long and winding road to…wherever the heck it goes.

I was hopeful and there was a map that looked like everything I genuinely expected when I voted for Prop 1. As I’ve written before, I’m not in Metro’s target market (don’t commute during normal hours, not a University student, avoid sketchy transfers in downtown, am out past 9pm) even though I am vocally in favor of using transit as much as possible. Oh well.

Metro is to be commended for a very innovative restructure proposal. But it’s been watered down so much. The Eastside changes are gone; the 271-45 through-route is gone; the 49-Madison is gone; the 48-67 through-route is gone. Half of those would have been things I personally would’ve used regularly. In a way, it’s hard to get excited about something missing so many of its best features.

But… this’s still a huge win for northeast Seattle. The 65 and 75 are full-time frequent, the 45 will be more reliable, and the 62 gives great new connectivity. And it might be a win for Capitol Hill, too, given the new frequency. Hopefully Metro can continue tweaking in the future; I’m already looking forward to the Eastside restructure proposal.

We, on First Hill, were dreading the All-Madison 11 … as we like the ETBs and don’t want to have to deal with buses slogging up the entire length of Madison … but we DID like the idea of the 49 running down Madison from Broadway … would have been a great temporary revision until Madison BRT comes online somewhere in 2019

The only thing they’ve done is double down on existing bus service between Broadway and downtown via Olive Way and via Pine St. They are not “connecting” any additional communities to the station, except for riders of the 11.

Where is increased frequency on the 60? you know … actually connecting the First Hill/Yesler Terrace community to the Capitol Hill station?

Slow as it may be, the FHSC will be faster from anywhere in Yesler Terrace to CHS than the 60 will be. It will also be more frequent, albeit still too infrequent to match up with Link. For what building the line cost, I don’t get it why the biggest cheap-out was the number of streetcars.

All of the Capitol Hill proposals had tradeoffs; none of them were universally better than another or the status quo. Capitol Hill/Madison is intrinsically difficult geographically, as the debates around these proposals have shown. People and destinations aren’t in a straight line going east of downtown. That was the weakness of the all-Madison route: the predominant trip pairs are more along Madison-Pine (the current 11). That doesn’t mean Madison BRT is a bad idea; it just means needs additional service hours rather than reshuffling the existing hours, otherwise it would create the gaps that the second proposal did. Also, middle/western Madison may become more of a destination in a decade or two when all the construction is built, it hopefully gets a wider variety of business destinations and nightlife, and some downtown buildings are more mixed-use/24 hour rather than the 6pm ghost town.

I have been following this process heavily, and I’m so exhausted with it I just want there to be a decision, so people can know where they can live, what buses will be around it, and how far they’ll have to walk.

The reason for doubling down on Pine and John Streets is the uncertainty of how trip patterns will change when Capitol Hill Station opens. In north Seattle it’s more obvious: people emerge from UW Station and want to go north, or they emerge from Roosevelt Station and want to go all four directions. But Capitol Hill/Madison has more crisscrossing trip patterns in all directions, and it’s a small are so a bus can’t go straight for several miles and built up ridership that way. And the multifamily areas are scattered around like islands, with a lower-ridership sea around them. So with all this uncertainty and the difficulty in serving everyone, maybe Metro should just be conservative and stick to Pine and John for now, where there’s proven existing ridership, and wait and see what happens a year after the station opens. I was nervous about lowering frequency on either John or Pine, because if Metro underestimated the demand on those streets there would be a hole that would depress ridership.

The 49-Madison always seemed like a questionable gamble to me. I’m surprised that two people are strongly defending it now. Perhaps it makes sense from First Hill’s perspective. I don’t think Metro expected it to be a great improvement (unlike the 62), but another compromise to allow deleting the 12, and to wean people off of the assumption that all buses are on Pine Street.

One interesting note is that some people have suggested rerouting the 7 to Boren to make it a crosstown route. Metro didn’t do that but it kind of did the same thing from the north, by rerouting some peak express routes from north Seattle to SLU and Boren Avenue. That could be the start of a similar goal from a different starting point: a crosstown, downtown-adjacent corridor, for some future unspecified all-day route.

The 49-Madison seems to me like the best of all worlds. With the opening of Link, there is really no trip that the current 49 will serve ideally. Riders along Pine could use a more frequent 10 or 11 just as easily, and riders along Broadway would almost universally get a faster trip by walking or transferring to Link. But the 49-Madison would create a frequent and reasonably fast new connection from Link to First Hill, running more often and hitting more key destinations than either the FHSC or the 60 will manage. As a side benefit it will also restore the frequent First Hill-U District link which has been missing for years, ever since the old 9 was discontinued.

As you know, I proposed a solution that consisted of:

-8 as split by Metro
-10 on John
-11 on Pine, with more frequency
-12 reduced to peak-only
-49-Madison
-60-Boren

I still believe this arrangement would work better than any of the Metro proposals to date.

David, Why the 60 on Boren? One of the nice things about the current 60 is its connectivity of Beacon Hill and Capitol Hill. I get that Link would capture many of the South Beacon Hill rides to Capitol Hill, but anywhere north of around College St and a 12th-to-John-to-Broadway 60 alignment would probably be faster. I definitely like Boren as a frequent corridor, maybe for the 7, but I don’t see it for the 60.

If you put the 49 on Madison, then the 60 is pretty much totally duplicative of the 49-Madison and the FHSC. Why not use those service hours to make a new connection that doesn’t exist today (First Hill to Denny Triangle/SLU)?

For Beacon Hill to Capitol Hill riders could use Link, or make frequent transfers either at 12th/Jackson or 9th/Madison if they are starting too far north on Beacon Hill for a backtrack to Link to make sense.

I can get behind that. It makes my particular trip more of a pain, but it’s admittedly a rather small number of people negatively impacted. And honestly, if Link wasn’t held up in between DSTT stops for so long (hopefully an issue of the past once this becomes a reality) backtracking might be worth it.

Many people who live off the Burke Gilman Trail are going to want to bike to Husky stadium to catch the train. It’s a short sweat free ride and. But as far as I can tell there will be few bike racks. What’s the plan to install large amounts of bike racks near husky stadium?

The new 62 “would preserve a one-seat ride to downtown for current route 71 riders in Ravenna and Roosevelt, and bring new frequent transfers to Wallingford, Fremont, and South Lake Union for riders throughout Northeast Seattle.”

That’s funny. That’s a 25-30 minute ride downtown…from the Fremont Bridge. No one in there right mind is sitting on that bus from anywhere on 65th all the way to downtown. The 71 used to get you from 50th and the AVe downtown in about 15 min if the I-5 express lanes were running south.

This is a great route once North Link opens, it will be a nice connection for northeast Seattle and Green Lake/Wallingford to the Roosevelt station. However, calling this a replacement of route 71 is a bit absurd.

Remember, there is a substantial amount of public housing and transitional housing services at Sand Point. Lots of disabled and elderly folks would gladly forgo transferring even it cost them an extra 20 minutes.

In previous proposals there has been vocal complaint from 71 riders who wanted to keep the one-seat ride downtown at any cost. This is partly an effort to keep that option available, even if it’s slower. Of course people remotely interested in travel time would take one of the frequent north/south routes connecting with the 62 (67, 372, 65, 75) and connect to Link.

There are always people who want a one-seat ride to downtown no matter how slow or infrequent it is. I call them “one-seat riders”. In the past Metro has kept many dubious slow milk runs that go downtown but miss the largest destinations in between: 25, 26, 42, etc. But recently Metro has found a win-win by piggybacking that market onto one or two larger crosstown transit markets. The 62 does just that: Sand Point to Roosevelt and most of north Seattle, which has been a transit hole forever, and people have been riding the slower/circuitous 30 and 75 out of frustration because there’s nothing better. If most of them get off by Greenlake and another cohort gets on to Fremont, and then another cohort gets on to downtown, isn’t that great? That provides the backbone of ridership to also accommodate a few one-seat riders from Ravenna to downtown.

Similarly, the 106 was downgraded from a freeway express to a Georgetown route, which made it function like two routes interlined at Rainier Beach. But it happens to also serve downtown to Renton for those who want to go that way. (And that ridership is propped up because if you take Link to Rainier Beach Station, you run the risk of waiting half an hour for a bus to Renton, and you’ve lost the opportunity to take the 101. Of course it would be better to have frequent buses from Rainier Beach to Renton, but that hasn’t happened yet.)

And still another thing with the 106. One of the cut proposals suggested rerouting it to Renton-Rainier Beach-MLK-Intl Dist Station. That was intended as a compromise to replace cuts on the 14, but Metro didn’t realize it would create a great crosstown connection between Renton and all of Rainier Valley, and replace the 42 milk run that some people are sore about losing. With so many south Seattlites moving to Renton the past few decades, it would probably be popular for family/friends/shopping trips. And incidentally it would resurrect an ancient route, the 142, that was deleted when the DSTT was build and the 101/106/107 created. (The 107 was also a downtown express then.) At that time there was nothing on MLK and the minority migration to Renton had just started, and it went on the Dearborn Street wasteland , but now all those things have changed so it could be a stronger route now. But it’s not one Metro has officially accepted the merits of. (Yet.)

I wonder if the 38 could eventually get extended down to Renton? It’s currently planned as an isolated South MLK route; if we splice the south part of the 106 there, I think things would be much better. (Except for the frequency… but I wouldn’t object to fifteen-minute Renton – Rainier Beach service!

I’m surprised at splitting the 8 at Mt Baker. That makes the 38 such a short route, and I don’t buy the argument that there’s congestion on MLK south of Mt Baker because I’ve never seen it. But I understand that if you’re on MLK near Madison (which is the part that’s a steep hill from the 48), that you’d rather have a useful terminus at Mt Baker rather than just petering out in Squire Park low density.

Given the marginal utility of the new Route 38, I wish they could extend it into a P-shaped or loop-shaped neighborhood circulator. One possible routing would extend from Mt. Baker east on McClellan to replace the useless 14 loop to Hunter Blvd, continuing south on 38th to Genesee, then jogging to Rainier through Columbia City and Hillman City, then return to Link at Othello or Rainier Beach station after serving the businesses on Rainier Avenue. Another strategy would be the same Mt. Baker/McClellan/Hunter/38th route, turning east on Genesee and replacing the 50, which would give some neighborhood usefulness to this segment of Route 50 and allow the existing Route 50 to be run south through Columbia City to Orcas and then east straight to end at Seward Park.

SE Seattle routes are structured to have Route 7/9 hit every commercial area from 23rd southward — with no other routes serving Rainier for no more than a few blocks. The current route design makes it hard for local residents who aren’t near Rainier to reach much on Rainier without a transfer. A productive route should have a mix of residential and community commercial destinations in addition to light rail transit. As a result of the current route design, routes like Route 50 perform terribly and buses are only every 30 minutes. With so many community destinations on Rainier — supermarkets, pharmacies, restaurants, international gather places — it would be awesome to facilitate those SE Seattle residents who don’t live close to Rainier to get to these community destinations without one or two transfers as well as attract more riders along those dead Route 14 and 50 corridor segments.

The Fremont changes are absurd and it’s hard to see how they are justified. The result will be to move two heavily used bus lines out of the heart of Fremont – a dense area – and require people to take a long, four-block walk uphill to catch the 26 or 28.

Metro doesn’t really do a good job of listening to public feedback when designing these restructures.

And, as is your usual pattern, you’re completely ignoring that the lines removed from Fremont will be replaced by a new line in Fremont that runs just as often and offers several new connections to higher-demand places than the existing lines serve.

“Metro doesn’t really do a good job of listening to public feedback when designing these restructures.”

Au contraire, Metro planners spend hundreds of hours meeting with the public, reading feedback, adjusting, spending a few hundred more hours meeting with the public, readjusting, (repeat iterations five to ten times), all the while being repeatedly insulted by people who think they know more about transit planning than the professionals do.

Have you read all the input you say Metro planners have ignored, Mr. Cruickshank?

Very strange to me that the new 62, billed as a 71 replacement, runs local on the south part of the 16 route, while the 26, starting at Greenlake, will run “express.” (on Aurora).

Works for me, but I understand the gripes that the 62 isn’t really going to get anyone downtown from Northeast Seattle. If it were, the 62 would cover the 26X route, and the 16 would still exist, and people would be less confused. Though I suppose the 26 route is so convoluted through Wallingford that it’s not really much slower than the 16 through Fremont.

Definitely agree on the comment about 542’s coverage. However, most of the time the 542 is faster from Green Lake P&R to Overlake because it avoids the 65/I-5 on-ramp and the 148th mess. The solution here is to extend the 542 up to Northgate via 5th. It wouldn’t require a ton of service hours, and would provide not only a North Seattle connection to the Overlake/Redmond area but also a faster express to the U District from Northgate given the likely 30-35 minute trip on the revised 67.

The 555/556 already provide a peak-hour alternative to the 67 and aren’t going away. So, extending the 542 would really be all about eliminating the transfer penalty to Redmond, and wouldn’t really carry any more riders.

If the goal is to provide a one-seat ride between Northgate and Microsoft without intermediate stops, you should lobby Microsoft to create a Connector route to Northgate to replace the discontinued 242. Given all the other places the Connector goes and that (I think) Microsoft is, today, paying a portion of the 242’s operating costs, the idea of a new Connector route replacing the Northgate section of the 242 doesn’t sound that far-fetched. With smaller buses, the operating costs of such a route should be cheaper.

As a Microsoft worker, I think the reason people aren’t taking it is that it avoids the Overlake TC where almost all other service departs. It does go through the main campus, but only at the very tail of the route – it then takes a 20-minute loop past 51st St and down 148th Ave. If it was moved from 148th to 520, I think ridership would boom.

Are you telling me that there are fewer people commuting from North Seattle to Overlake NOW than 15 years ago? Doesn’t pass the sniff test.

The reality is the 242 never saw a service revision to pull it off the service pattern that once upon a time, every Microsoft oriented route took. It still wandered, slowly through campus, while every other bus served Overlake TC and got right on the freeway.

Its isolation from the rest of the network did it in.

Is this an example of Metro neglecting a once popular route to the point of elimination?

“Are you telling me that there are fewer people commuting from North Seattle to Overlake NOW than 15 years ago?”

No, but now there are far more other buses from the west side to Overlake, running much more frequently. 15 years ago there was no ST 555, 545 or 542 — just a reverse-peak Metro 263 that made a few trips each way from downtown. The 242 was the only reasonable way from any of North Seattle to the Eastside.

Would it have done better if it had been revised to serve Overlake TC directly? Probably. But the vastly faster 555/545 combo would have still taken away the riders from Northgate and points north, and the 542 would have taken a few of the Greenlake and Montlake riders due to its superior frequency.

The big issues of the 242 are it’s low frequency and it’s routing through Microsoft. Taking the 148th exit eats up a ton of time (often 10+ minutes just sitting in traffic down the exit ramp), so whatever time the bus saves by bypassing the U-district is lost. Even if you’re already on the 242 leaving Seattle, you can actually get to main campus faster by getting off at Evergreen Point and transferring to the 542/545. That is how broken the 242 is.

It should also be mentioned that even without all the stops in the U-district, taking I-5 over the ship canal during rush hour is anything but fast.

Over time, the 242 has lost ridership to various competing services. The 542 runs more frequently than the 242 and makes up for going through the U-district with a faster routing through Microsoft. Microsoft also operates a Connector route to Phinney Ridge and Green Lake, which further cuts into the 242’s ridership.

On top of this, Sound Transit added some new 555 trips to make the 555/545 combo more appealing (the last 555 trip used to leave Northgate Transit Center as early as 8 AM, now, it’s around 9:30). And, with Metro’s latest restructures, a connection to the 542 in the U-district becomes more attractive than it was before.

66/67/68 changes suck. No more off peak service at all on 5th, and no more 5th service to UW. This means a long walk up the hill to Roosevelt (not a big deal if you’re already on 5th, but sucky if you’re on 1st or 3rd) or a long trudge north to NGTC in which you have to endure ridiculous routing on Northgate Way to get to Roosevelt.

The new 63 will provide a peak connection to the new 45 near Roosevelt Station. So, it is at least the basis of a future Link connector. Off-peak, Metro is going for a more-frequent network, and this is the price. I’ll take it over having hourly routes every five blocks.

63 is just the existing 66. It’s not new as Metro claimed–just renumbered. I don’t see what the point is–65th isn’t opening until Northgate opens, so depending on how far north you are of 80th it may be faster to transfer to Link at Northgate.

Comparison: 5th already has 15 minute headways (66+67); Roosevelt is 30 (68) and 15th is 30.
The only thing we’re getting is 15 minute headways on Roosevelt with the new 67 routing, the old 66 doesn’t change except removing the off-peak routing, the 73 stays the same, and the 68 goes away.

Seems like a loser to me. 15 minute service shifts east by five blocks and the 30 minute service shifts west and kills its off-peak service.

The 63 only overlaps with a small portion of the old 66, which is why Metro renumbered it. It uses 5th rather than Roosevelt between 80th and Green Lake; uses I-5 Express Lanes instead of Eastlake; and goes to SLU and First Hill rather than downtown.

Yeah, its bad for Pinehurst as well. We simply will have worse bus service. No trade-off (nothing is coming more often) it will just be worse. But at least with that I feel like we are just “taking one of the team”. Things will be much better for some folks but worse for us.

But the 67 button hook is ridiculous. It makes no sense to me. It will simply cost a lot of time (which means it costs frequency) while picking up a small number of additional riders. My only hope is that Seattle builds this soon: https://seattletransitblog.com/2015/05/25/roosevelt-hct-is-underway/
That would make things much better for the region, and might get Metro to “straighten out” the 67, by simply heading it north to Pinehurst/Jackson Park. This is turn, would make the 73 fairly redundant, and allow it to be removed. Or we could do the opposite and shift the frequency to the 73 and kill off the 67. I have no idea when this would happen (if it happens).

The 67’s routing makes some sense to me. Currently, the 67 goes straight to the Northgate Transit Center, while the 68 serves Northgate Way and the Northgate malls before the transit center. Taking the 67 to Northgate is a hassle if you’re going shopping, it’s a long walk to the North end of the mall, let alone Target/Best Buy/shops along Northgate Way. Metro seems to have decided there was enough ridership to the malls to justify the longer routing. When I take the 68 to Northgate, more people get off at 5th and Northgate Way then the transit center, and when I take the 68 to UW, more people get on at Northgate Way and 5th than the transit center.

Of course the “straightening out” would remove the service from Northgate, and even though the Roosevelt HTC project could restore service to the UDistrict, it would have no service to the train station. Perhaps right around the time the 41 (an express a lot of folks transferring at NTC rely on) is removed from the tunnel.

None of these trade-offs will really matter when North Link is done, but until then, I suspect there will be a lot of back and forth on what the right trade offs are to reduce the pain of change until the train gets here.

Previously, you could hop on a 66 to downtown. Probably not the fastest, but it’d work.

If you wanted to, you could hop on the next northbound 66 or 67 and in about four minutes you’d be at the transit center where you could hop on a 41.

Now, your only option is to walk five blocks east and hop on the 67 and take it all the way to Northgate Way (prob about 5 minutes) and then slog along Northgate Way and around the mall.
At that point, even 73 -> U-Link would probably be faster.

>> Metro seems to have decided there was enough ridership to the malls to justify the longer routing.

I doubt it. Metro probably did what they traditionally did — focus on including the most one seat riders, not a fast network. Only this time they created a service hole in the process. It is as if they had one guy saying “make it faster, cut out the redundancy so we can increase frequency” and another guy saying “don’t forget every possible one seat ride”. The end result is this — a mess. It screws up the grid. It creates a big hole. All so that Roosevelt riders can get a one seat ride to … the mall? Wait, the north end of the mall? It’s not like that trip was that bad before. There are a half dozen buses that go there now. Get off the bus and you can catch a bus headed that direction in no time.

Here is another (probably rather common) connection: UW Clinic at Northwest Hospital to UW Medical Center. Take the 345 to the transit center, then take the 67. Since the 67 runs every ten minutes, and runs right towards campus, it is very quick shot. Except that it doesn’t run every ten minutes, because it spends too much time wandering around Northgate. So now you lose both frequency and time. These are the types of trips that drive people to drive. Metro simply dropped the ball on this one.

@Tim If you’re at 92nd and 5th, you could also walk downhill to 1st and catch a 40 near the bridge and ride it to the transit center. It would be a lot faster than catching 67 if you’re going to the transit center.

Apparently Roosevelt is the real center of the Maple Leaf neighborhood, not 5th, which was never my impression but whatever. Metro wanted to serve that real center even though the most logical service pattern would have run on 5th and 15th and this means a confusing Roosevelt and 15th service pattern plus the buttonhook.

Anyone living west of 5th Ave NE is screwed since the routes 66/67 on 5th Ave NE are going away. It’s way faster to take the 66/67 up to the Northgate transit center and take the Metro bus #41 downtown than it will be to take the new milk run route 67 to the stadium to the light rail station to downtown. That’s even the case during the worst afternoon rush hour traffic. There is going to be nothing fast about the new route 67.

Even if you want to go downtown from 5th and 92nd, you still don’t really need a bus down 5th. Want to go downtown? Walk to Northgate Transit Center and ride the 41. Want to go to Greenwood or Ballard? Walk down 92nd to the other side of I-5 and ride the 40. Want to go to the U-district? Walk to Roosevelt and ride the 67?

Even in today’s world, waiting for the 66 to go half a mile to Northgate Transit Center is likely to be no faster than walking anyway, once wait time is taken into account.

Also, having ridden the 26, 28, 40 (and 17 before that) from North Queen Anne to downtown for more than 8 years, I can’t imagine how replacing the 26/28 couplet arriving every 7 min. or so peak with a 15 min frequency route is going to work. While the 26/28 were rarely full when they crossed the Fremont Bridge, they would usually be full (crush load) by the time they got to Aloha St. I also imagine due to the length of the route, the 62 is unlikely to be very reliable schedule-wise. The lack of a local 28 running through Fremont is also going to add more riders to the already overburdened 40. It will be interesting to see how this works out. Glad I’m a Link Commuter now.

The new 62 will come every “7-15” minutes during peak. The “15” is hopefully a typo. Or maybe it is a recognition that bus bunching will happen, just as it already inevitably does when two routes are interlined to provide that frequency.

Metro’s definition of “peak” means 5-9 AM, 3-7 PM Monday-Friday. The “15” will be at lower-demand sections of the “peak” period, such as before 6:30 AM. The “7” will be at the highest-demand sections of the peak period.

If you read closely the article says the 62 will be “more frequent” than 15 min headways at peak. No specifics, and I doubt it’ll match the current Dexter frequency, but there will be more than 4 buses/hour at peak.

So they’re really planning 15-minute or better frequency from 5:15 AM to 11 PM on the new 62, all the way down 65th? I can see that looking great after Roosevelt Station opens, but it’ll look pretty sparse for a few years.

You need the frequency to start building up the ridership over several years. Then it will be all ready for Roosevelt Station, and people will be used to it going west to Greenlake rather than turning south on 15th.

Since the new 26 will no longer terminate at East Greenlake, why does it still have to zigzag between 65th and Woodlawn instead of using 65/Ravenna? Drivers of the articulated buses are having a very hard time negotiating these sharp turns.

7-10 is probably reasonable, but 15 won’t be. And they’ll need to be 60′ buses during peak. It used to drive me nuts that during the evening commute sometime between 5:30 and 6, there would be the 26/28 local had a longer headway because of the express trips and then the local that shows up at the north end of Downtown is a full-to-the-gills 40’er. They would do this once in a while in the mornings, too. Just randomly switching to a 40′ bus during for one trip, which would be a nightmare.

19th Avenue was lucky the 12 got saved, but it wasn’t because they deserve it or ride it much off-peak. It’s because nothing else could replace middle/western Madison service when both the all-Madison route and 49-Madison were rejected. 19th Avenue is also vocal and organized: they made the second-loudest campaign for keeping their route. (The loudest being “Save Route 2” during the cuts, and the third-largest now “Don’t Do Too Much to Route 11”.) So essentially Metro did it for Madison, and 19th came along for the ride because it traditionally went there, and it also avoided the political opposition of the 19th Avenue crowd.

Which is why the added 12 service at night is so bizarre. I doubt 19th Ave supporters were clamoring for more service at 10:30pm. They wanted to keep workday peak commute service, or to keep the 12 unchanged.

I wonder if keeping the 12 is because it is the precursor for Madison BRT (in terms of service hours). I can see Metro coming back in a few years saying there has been little to no ridership increase on 19th and instead with SDOT, wiring up Madison to MLK or beyond and redirecting the 12 there. Now you have Madison BRT, no service investment required… likely with even more frequent service given the bus-only lanes Downtown and on First Hill.

The additional runs are because of Prop 1, and are being added this year I think. Again it’s to serve Madison, and the 19th Avenue tail comes along because it’s got the trolley wire and layover space. The 12 used to turn back around 12th & Madison but I don’t know if it still can, and in any case Metro wants to push the frequent service further east to at least 15th or 19th.

Layover space is actually a significant planning/expense issue. Sometimes it’s as cost-effective to go a bit further to a good layover space even if it overserves the tail. For instance, they’re building a larger terminus at SPU and the 3 and 4 will go there as well as the 13. Not because north Queen Anne needs buses every 7 minutes but because it’s not long enough to require additional buses, and it’s a better layover space, so why not overserve north Queen Anne and get more service on the main street. So if 19th & Aloha is a good layover space which it seems to be, then that may be enough to convince Metro to keep the 12 running to it if it’s doing the other part of the route anyway.

Mike, it is still possible for the 12 to turn around short of 19th. It is unusual though – only 3 AM peak trips use it according to the schedule.

Left on 13th, right on Pine, right on 15th, right on Madison.

The last outbound stop on Madison would be at 12th and the first inbound stop would also be at 12th, since the 14th/15th stop is now closed for some reason – is it permanent or just construction related? I’m not sure a short-12 would go far enough to be very useful. The current trips that turn around are intended for hospital workers, I believe.

I suspect that Metro wants to see how CHS/Link attractiveness will affect ridership patterns on 19th Avenue. Will 19th Avenue riders still use Route 12 with such frequent access on Route 8/11 to Capitol Hill Station? It could easily be that the 8/11 service on 19th Avenue will draw away enough riders to allow for Route 12 service on 19th Avenue to be axed sometime in the future — and instead calling those Route 12 buses the Madison BRT.

Ii wouldn’t be surprised if one of the contributing reasons for the shift to 19th Avenue for Routes 8/11 is to relieve lots of citizen pressure from the inevitable fight to no longer serve 19th Avenue if Madison BRT happens.

Wow, and I thought Metro could not screw 43 riders any harder. So, if you live east of 15th and want to go to the University District you have to take an out of the way detour to Madison just to go north again on a 48, go to CHS and double connect with a train/bus or connect to a 49 which even with “enhanced frequency” is less frequent most times than the 43. I still don’t understand why Metro is so hot to make changes that shouldn’t be made until NorthLink open now.

When is the 43 more frequent than the 49 is going to be? The only time the 43 even hits 10 minutes today is northbound between 6-7 AM, or southbound between 6-7 PM, and that’s just because of the extra trolleys going to or from the 44.

During the week, the 43 from Capitol Hill to the U-District is essentially every 10 minutes or less from 5:43AM-7:25AM nothbound and 3:23PM-6:28PM southbound. And 10 minutes is at the high end. There are times when 43’s have 0 minute headways (two 43’s leave U District at 6:20PM for instance).

I appreciate that people in Northeast Seattle are the big winners here but Metro is robbing Peter (Capitol Hill) to pay Paul (Northeast Seattle). After voting for Prop 1 to pay for better transit service it is a bitter pill to see transit service that is appreciably worse.

William C, PeteyNice has been benefiting from 43 frequency far in excess of demand at the particular hours he rides, which is there solely to get trolley buses to and from Route 44. There is no way he would have come out ahead in any rational restructure.

@asdf2 Google Maps says it is a 13 min walk from where I live to CHS. That is just slightly less time than it takes to get to Westlake on a 43. Downtown is less of an issue since the 11 will pick up that slack and I can always walk a couple of blocks and get a 10. Getting the U-District though is going to suck. I have already decided to pay for parking on campus once this happens. Having to transfer with no direct benefit in return is just not worth it for such a short trip.

@William C. I live at about 17th & John. Yes, when Brooklyn Station opens it will be less of an issue. But that is five years+ from now. I feel like when this started, Metro grabbed the “bus restructure when NorthLink opens” folder and refused to acknowledge their mistake and instead doubled down on it. All of these changes make sense when there is Link to Brooklyn Ave. But now? it is just punishing anyone south of the ship canal who wants to go to U-District.

I see. So the issue is getting to the north-west part of the U-district, rather than downtown, so Link would still involve a transfer. In that case, just walk to 23rd and take the 48. Except for an extra 5 minutes of walking, it would be exactly the same trip as the 43 would be today. With the 48 being split in the U-district, its reliability should improve substantially. It’s also getting a frequency boost as well.

Reg N had recommended 19th, 15th, 12th, or Broadway, and Metro took up 19th. By that time Reg N had moved to favoring 12th or Broadway the strongest.

The issue is the transit hole between Madison Beach/Valley and mid Madison (Broadway to 23rd). An all-Madison route would have served that at the expense of Madison-Capitol Hill trips. But Metro favors going from Madison Park to Capitol Hill Station, and the Madiison-John route would move it away from the Trader Joe’s area which is what creates this hole. So Metro moved it to 19th to cover more of the mid Madison area (which includes Trader Joe’s, a church at 19th & Madison, a hearing center, apartments, a duplex I used to live in, etc).

It’s easy to tell people to walk 1/10th of a mile, but what are you going to do with seniors, the disabled or parents with kids? Are these people to be excluded from using Metro? I walk over 4 blocks just to get to the bus and I’m not complaining, but the proposed changes for the 8, 11 and 43 make no sense since hey violate Metro’s own ideas of duplication.

So is the idea to get people to ride the bus, or get them to find alternatives like cars, taxis or Uber?

Seniors, disabled, and kids are everywhere; they aren’t just on Madison. If they were just on Madison then you’d have a point. But they also live on Latona, NE 75th, 15th, Alki, Kingsgate, and everywhere else. The current network works for some of then but not others. The restructure benefits some of them but not others. It’s impossible to restructure in a way that benefits all senior/disabled/underage people, and it’s unfair to give extra advantage to those on a single street at the expense of everybody else — including other senior/disabled/underage people.

I know everyone’s restrictions are different (and, honestly, that you’re probably trolling to some extent), but I have cerebral palsy and still manage to walk 0.4 miles to and from each bus stop to go to work every morning. If you’re really that disabled, get a card and use Access. If you’re a parent, exercise is good for your kids and Metro has recently revamped its stroller policies.

Seriously, complaining about 1/10th of a mile… plenty of people have that distance to walk from their house to their parked car. Be real.

1/10th of a mile is about 176yds (5,280/10/3), or about 1.5 football fields. If the parents with kids are Seahawk fans, well, getting into their seat from their car seat in the parking lot was likely over 1/10th of a mile.

One final thought here — can we all please begin to get a little bit excited for what’s about to happen?

Two major new light rail stations are just within our grasp. Whether or not the bus network is perfect — the enemy of good — for Capitol Hill or not is nitpicking. The first restructure is happening, folks. Let’s get it working, get some data, and then insert a round of fixes. Big shakeups always have their detractors, and always take time and effort to normalize. The hope is that more people will benefit than not. Patterns will shift; people will adapt.

This is a big deal, all of it. It’s going to become tougher to wait as opening day approaches.

I think most riders are very excited about the changes. There will always be glitches that will be worked out over time. I hope that each new route, such as the 63, has had a ‘test ride’ rather than being just a paper proposal.

As I said above I think Metro should be applauded for making such an aggressive restructure, given the limited changes that are occurring. It would be very easy for Metro to wait until Link gets to Northgate. Most people (including myself) felt that they would. Husky Stadium is a very problematic location (as this article mentioned). If U-Link included the U-District, then I would have expected Metro to propose significant changes; but with this (and only this) I think they are showing that they are willing to mix things up.

Meanwhile, Capitol Hill was always going to be terrible for bus to light rail interaction. That was in the cards once Sound Transit decided to build one station, and ignore how that station mixed with buses. So while there are a lot of things here people like, I think that Metro deserves credit for pushing hard for more of a grid with more frequency.

Based on the comments, I think it might make sense for Metro to just freeze the Capitol Hill changes, until SDOT finishes the Madison BRT. I could be wrong — maybe there are people who love these changes but they aren’t making many comments — but it seems like the consensus is that the current routing is better than the new routing on Capitol Hill. Even with my complaints about the north end (I personally come out way worse) I don’t feel that way in general. There are people in Roosevelt, for example, that will get a lot more frequent service. This is a good thing, and makes up for the negatives. So unless the changes in Capitol Hill are required to add frequency everywhere, I would keep that area the same. The Madison BRT project serves as a good excuse (even though I think the new routing would be just fine with it).

Thank you for you comments and I couldn’t agree more since I actually proposed looking at the Capital Hill changes after Light Rail is implemented. The current plan doesn’t fix anything and steps on removing duplication and having buses run with as few turns as possible!

What’s most interesting, Metro in it’s unknown wisdom has united the users of the 8, 11 and 43 in opposition to the current plan!

The changes need to be looked at together for CH, and this is a joke. When I thought of 19th versus 24th I really had no idea of he impact it would have west of 19th! For example, just think of the 11 and 12 both trying to turn at 19th! I think 12th ave East would be far better and an easier sell.

I told Metro to go carefully with Capitol Hill, and consider delaying it if there wasn’t enough time to plan a good restructure, but that if it goes ahead with it, it should reevaluate Capitol Hill a year after Link opens, to see if the ridership patterns match the predictions, and to make sure that mid Madison hole isn’t too burdensome.

It appears the RossB, Mike Orr and I agree on delaying changes to the CH portion of the restructure until Light rail is implemented. This is one too many screwy plan and it looks like it was designed by a committee with the actual needs of the bus riders be damned!

Yes! The new light rail and bus line restructures are game changers for NE Seattle transit. I was amazed yesterday morning at the number of people waiting for buses while driving to drop my daughter off at soccer practice (I then caught a 73 to downtown to go to work).

Lots of new families in NE Seattle lately too. Montlake triangle will be really busy in January. I wonder if I can get a license for a coffee/muffin cart there?

Yeah, it’ll be pretty cool! I would be interested in seeing how many fewer people there are at 4th and Pike, since it seems like a lot of people are making precisely the DT / Broadway trip. Any reasonably well-considered shakeup with any meaningful change from before speaks of new possibilities.

And kudos to the new 78 line. I think most people look at Stadium station as a portal to the UW, but for folks that live in the Sandpoint area with its boxed in scenario, framed in by the heavy Montlake, 45th st and etc traffic, it is a godsend. We will now be able to rediscover all destinies south of UW.

The “interactive map” of the recommended changes on Metro’s site is a bit wonky. You can click to turn various layers on and off. There is a layer for “frequent all-day service” and one for “all day service.”

But the routes are different! I prefer the “frequent all-day service” layer, which has a all-Madison 11, the 49 on Broadway & Madison, and the 8 remaining on John between 19th & 23rd. Cleaner and more straight-forward than the “all day service” Capitol Hill plan.

There has been talk for years about the 48S becoming a trolley. The new 23rd Ave design even considers future trolley wire, but if I recall, there isn’t any funding for the gap in the wire south of John.

I’m most interested in this as well. With the split of the 48, and it no longer being proposed to through route with the 67 (alt 1), how likely is the electrification of the remainder of the 48 route? SDOT’s study last year said they were applying for grant funding. Is there any new info on that process? With the remake of 23rd Ave underway, and not scheduled for completion until early 2017, this obviously wouldn’t be ready for the upcoming March restructure, but I do hope they coordinate the work of stringing the overhead while the work on 23rd is underway.

It requires funding. SDOT is preparing the right of way as part of the 23rd project, so that the wires can be easily plugged in. But there would have to be a capital project to electrify it, and that means some not-currently-known tax source. Unless Metro can pull together enough spare change for it someday… but then it would have to buy more trolleybuses for it.

We should not worry about abandoning short segments of line (15th to 23rd, or 19th or the spaghetti on top of Queen Anne, or even Summit for that matter). We mustn’t let fifty-year-old trolley routing get in the way of good restructures that create more frequent and straight corridors. The destinations were in different places and of different kinds then, and more families with children lived in the apartments and houses to support the legacy routes. I’m not saying that rerouting the 11 is definitely better, but we shouldn’t force routes to follow existing trolley wire if it doesn’t make sense anymore.

48 electrification needs to be in the context of a general trolleybus expansion. There are probably other routes that deserve it too. Right now Metro is just replacing the existing trolleybuses. Expanding the trolley network would be a set of capital projects on several deserving routes. But first we need to get all the reorganizations settled down and decide where those routes should be and make a priority list. Seattle’s Transit Master Plan has some suggestions, and Metro is working on a long-term plan that will presumably have more suggestions. Then they’ll need to be prioritized and funding found. Oh, and please recast future streetcar routes as trolleybus routes. We should have the speed of Link and the low-cost of buses, not the worst of both worlds in a streetcar.

You might see an occasional trolley bus on 23th/24th Ave E. Remember the Route 44 has to deadhead somehow to/from Atlantic Base, and uses the Rt. 43 wire to deadhead. So, the wire will not be totally dead.

That change is almost certain to happen at some point. It’s in every Link integration plan I’ve seen from Sound Transit. The 545 would either become a peak route or disappear, and its off-peak frequency would be reallocated to the 542.

But I’m at least somewhat okay with waiting to see how full the 542/541 is for the first six months or so, and reevaluating the peak service later. Off-peak, however, the 542/541 doesn’t run – which is a problem; it should be the 545 that only runs peak hours.

“What’s the logic behind removing the bus that’s almost always at crush loads?”

The crush loads is exactly the point. Since the 542 is shorter than the 545, it can run more frequently, alleviating the crush loads. The only alternative way to alleviate the crush loads on the 545 would be cannibalize service-hours from other routes.

By using Link to avoid the traffic getting in and out of downtown, it will often be faster anyway. Furthermore, many of today’s 545 riders live in Capitol Hill. They would presumably use Capitol Hill Station and avoid downtown completely.

Wait; what part of the city do you live in where you don’t already have to do that for the 545? Are you talking about the Denny triangle / Convention Place / Bellevue Ave? How much ridership comes from that area, and is it worth doubling the service hours for the whole bus route rather than directing you to Capitol Hill Station?

I would much rather see a more frequent, all-day 542, than a less frequent, all-day 545. The 545, as currently exists, spends nearly half it service hours between Montlake and the south end of downtown.

When Montlake Freeway Station finally closes, Sound Transit will have no choice but to embrace an all-day 542 as an off-peak replacement for the 545. With the huge backups to the Montlake exit in the eastbound direction, a 545 stop on top of the Montlake lid will be completely unworkable.

Why would the 545 stop at Montlake at all once the flyer stop is gone? Anyone going from downtown to Montlake will be on the LR. Anyone riding the 545 in from Redmond can transfer at Yarrow or Evergreen Point to a U-District bus.

I am overjoyed that the 520 express buses are not being forced to terminate at the UW Station yet. Until we know how the new 520 bridge, the new Montlake exits, and the new bus integration at the station work – or don’t work, as the case may be, I very much would like ST and Metro to leave the 545 and 255 at least alone.

You must not ride the 545 during AM peak or the 255 during PM peak. I ride the 255 home every day between 5:00 and 6:30 and can’t wait for the day when there are no joint ops and no waiting for 10 minutes on I-5.

Transfer to what U-District bus, running how often? Off-peak, there’s only the 271. It runs every-fifteen-minutes off-peak, and half-hourly on weekends… and what’s more, it doesn’t serve Evergreen Point or Yarrow Point. The Montlake stop is rather heavily used now; I wouldn’t want to force everyone to wait half an hour for the 271 even if it did serve Evergreen Point.

This’s all the more vital once Link is opened further north, making UW Station the gateway to everything north of Capitol Hill.

True – I was thinking we were talking about during peak times, as the person I replied to was talking about the backups at Montlake. Off-peak, I’d think getting up on the lid and back down would be fairly easy. Except when the bridge is open or a game is being played…

I ride the 255 or 545 every day. In the current conditions, both those buses will be at Westlake before a transfer could even be made at the UW Station. The PM is an issue for both buses. Yesterday, it was very quick at 5. Today it might not be. The question is, what happens at the Station? Will the 255 be slogging back and forth to Children’s and be delayed in Montlake traffic? Will the 545 be laying over?

“In the current conditions, both those buses will be at Westlake before a transfer could even be made at the UW Station.”

I feel like you and I are living in different realities. I rode a 255 to work this morning, later than normal for me — arriving downtown around 9:15. It took 16 minutes to get from Montlake to Convention Place, because we sat in traffic waiting to exit at Stewart. With the UW Station transfer I would have been at University Street by then even if I had just missed a train.

I have recently gotten in the habit of working from home in the mornings and commuting to Redmond between 11 AM and noon. I have routinely witnessed the eastbound Montlake exit ramp backed up solid, all the way to I-5, during these times. To subject every Seattle->Redmond rider to these kinds of traffic jams would be intolerable.

Evenings and weekends, the Montlake exit is usually fine, but even then, it can back up heavily if there is a Husky game or any other large event going on at the UW.

Granted, route 542 is still subject to a little bit of congested around the Montlake Bridge, but between the bus lane on Pacific St. and the proposed HOV exit ramp off westbound 520, the bus should be spared most of it. Even the 2-lane Montlake exit ramp that just opened a couple weeks ago, with no transit priority, is still a significant improvement.

It look me 16 minutes this morning to get to IDS (not CPS) from the Montlake flyer stop… maybe we do live in different worlds, David.

Look, all I am saying is that no one knows what will happen to traffic patterns and transfer times once the new bridge and new Montlake exits are open and the LR is running. If all that works well, I 100% support terminating all 520 buses at the UW Station, all the time. I’d benefit personally tremendously as I get on at EVP – I’d have buses coming by every few minutes feeding the light rail. (Now, please build UW-Ballard so I can get there too ;)). But, until then, Metro has made the right choice not to restructure.

Want to torpedo ST3 on the Eastside? Have thousands of 520 bus riders stuck on Montlake Blvd everyday in the summer and fall of 2016. Until we know that won’t happen, there’s no reason to change the routes.

what a bunch of whiners, everyone wants Metro to serve every house/apt in NE Seattle and Capitol Hill? No such thing as optimal routes for everyone or every Neighborhood. Example: why is Northgate Mall the all important destination for Metro? Makes no sense.

You do if you are coming from the west side of the freeway. All of the buses that come down meridian (other than the 16 — which is going away) terminate at the transit center after crossing the 92nd street bridge and a quick jaunt down 1st.

I suppose you’d rather these buses terminate somewhere on 5th or Roosevelt instead? Where would they get the layover space?

With this proposal, all of this becomes the 67 which provides no better service than the 66x/67 combo listed above. Is the lack of coverage/frequency on evenings and weekends a result of all the split routes? What would be needed to bring the 67 to 15 minute frequencies evenings and Sundays considering it will be the only route for upper Roosevelt, Maple Leaf, and the Northgate-U District connection the majority of the time.

“What would be needed to bring the 67 to 15 minute frequencies evenings and Sundays considering it will be the only route for upper Roosevelt, Maple Leaf, and the Northgate-U District connection the majority of the time.”

Alternative 1 had just that, funded by not having to pay for the 73. When the 73 was added, something had to be cut to pay for it.

That said, most of the Prop 1 money is not going to NE Seattle because that’s not where most of the ridership is. It’s going to places like Ballard and Capitol Hill.

The interactive map is a mess. It still shows the “all-Madison route 11.” Also, when panning the map, the route 11 label switches back and fourth between the “all-day route” color and the “frequent route” color.

The distance between UW Station and the new stops will be just a hair over 1000 feet, with no interruptions for traffic lights or grade crossings. That should be about a 5-minute walk, or even a bit less, for an average walker.

You ask a very good question, but the first question, why is the 8 moved to East Madison in the first place. Secondly why remove access to places on East Pine between 19th Ave East and Broadway?

I would like to have someone on this blog explain how a person going west on East Madison via the 11 to get to the Community College on Broadway?

I would also like to hear how a current bus rider of the 11 who gets the bus at 17th Ave East going east would get to Madison Valley?

Lastly, can’t Metro figure out how seamless transfers work? If they could then they wouldn’t have to spend so much time explaining how to get from point a to b. Please no 500 feet nonsense since that is just an excuse for a broken proposal and the reason all the proposals since March 2015 have failed!

It is really amazing how some on this blog support each proposal that Metro submits and for the same reasons and attach those who use the bus and want to be able to get there desired locations next March and I will be to be the would accept seamless transfers, I know I would! This is NOT people rejecting change, it’s people who want to have a logical bus system that works for all and yes we can accept change, but only if it makes sense!

You are right and for the same reason the 11 could stay as is since users of the LR could walk from Broadway and Pine, right! The bigger picture is that the connects west of 19th are not seamless and require everyone to walk, not matter there condition, age or weather!

Transfer distance is more critical than origin/destination distance. People expect to walk some distance to and from transit, but once they’re on it they expect transfers to be direct and seamless. The point of moving the 11 is to bring it closer to the nearest Link station. Some people will walk south to the college instead of north. Some will take Link one station to downtown to avoid traffic. Some will take Link two stations to University Street if it’s closer to 3rd Avenue bus stops (again, transfer distance). Some will take Link to north Seattle or the Eastside or SeaTac, and will be glad they don’t have to take the bus all the way to Westlake (current 11) or University Street (previous proposal).

As I’ve said, there’s a good argument for keeping the current 11. Now that the 12 is restored and the changes in general are less than expected, maybe they could be even less than that too? But at the same time, the latest 11 is not the end of the world. And there’s is good reason to have common corridors with double-frequency. I’m not sure if Olive-John-19th-Madison from Bellevue to 28th is one of those cases, but it may be. I also wouldn’t object to your proposal to move the north-south part further west. But I don’t see the need to get all activist about any one of the alternatives, because I’m not 100% convinced one is clearly better than the others.

That’s why it’s important for Metro to review Capitol Hill again in 2017 or 2018, to see how well the restructure is doing. It’s also why it’s important for Madison BRT to have new service hours, so that we don’t have to rob Peter to pay Paul. That doesn’t mean status-quo routes should automatically be kept, but more service hours would make it easier to compensate for any rerouting.

1. Convert the new 8 to trolleybus, which is partly electrified aleady using the old 43 wire?

2. Eliminate the dipsy-do southward to Madison? It’s already covered by the 11.

3. It seems like there is something better to do with the tail end of the 12 than the current lesser used segment it has, but other than send it further down Madison, which already has two other routes on it, I’m not sure what.

Now is not the time to commit to electrifying. It’s outside the scope of the current project, it would cost significant money that should be separately deliberated and allocated (and doesn’t exist anyway), and should be planned in the context of a citywide trolley expansion; i.e., which routes throughout the city are the best candidates for electrification. I consider these Capitol Hill routes (8, 10, 11, 12, 49) volatile right now, so we shouldn’t make any long-term commitments about them because it may be necessary to change them again. We still don’t know how ridership will change after the station opens. And the 8 will likely to move to Thomas Street when/if Bertha gets done.

I’m really looking forward to the NE Seattle changes but am still so disappointed by the lack of a simple bus-rail transfer facility at Montlake Triangle. I presume it’s due to UW unwillingness to give up any parking lot or scenic landscaping real estate for this purpose.

Well, the best transfer to get downtown from anywhere on the 48 is almost certainly Link, despite the backtrack. It’s hard to overstate how much faster Link will be than surface buses. But from north to south the 48 will connect to the following downtown routes:

Has Metro announced how they will be re-routing all the buses that now use the bus tunnel once it’s closed to bus traffic when the next leg of LINK starts running to the UW Stadium? They will be all on surface streets in downtown Seattle. As if there isn’t enough gridlock already…